Of Sir Thomas Urquhart
very little is known but what is related by himself, and though as much
an egotist as most men, he has related but little of a kind available to
the biographer. But there are characters of so original a cast that
their more prominent features may be hit off by a few strokes; and Sir
Thomas’s is decidedly of this class. It is impossible to mistake the
small dark profile which he has left us, small and dark though it be,
for the profile of any mind except his own. He was born in 1613, the
eldest son of Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty, and of Christian,
daughter of Alexander Lord Elphinston. Of his earlier years there is not
a single anecdote, nor is there anything known of either the manner or
place in which he pursued his studies. Prior to the death of his father,
and, as he himself expresses it, “before his brains were yet ripened for
eminent undertakings,” he made the tour of Europe. In travelling through
France, Spain, and Italy, he was repeatedly complimented on the fluency
with which he spoke the languages of these countries, and advised by
some of the people to pass himself for a native. But he was too true a
patriot to relish the proposal. He had not less honour, he said, by his
own poor country than could be derived from any country whatever; for,
however much it might be surpassed in riches and fertility—in honesty,
valour, and learning, it had no superior. And this assertion he
maintained at the sword’s point, in single combat three several times,
and 4t each time discomfited his antagonist. He boasts on another
occasion, that not in all the fights in which he had ever been engaged,
did he yield an inch-breadth to the enemy before the day of Worcester
battle.

On the breaking out of
the troubles in 1638, he took part with the King against the
Covenanters, and was engaged in an obscure skirmish, in which he saw the
first blood shed that flowed in the protracted quarrel, which it took
half a century and two great revolutions to settle. In a subsequent
skirmish, he succeeded, with eight hundred others, many of them “brave
gentlemen,” in surprising a body of about twelve hundred strong,
encamped at Turriff, and broke up their array. And then marching with
his friends upon Aberdeen, which was held by the Covenanters, he
assisted in ejecting them, and in taking possession of the place. Less
gifted with conduct than courage, however, the cavaliers suffered their
troops to disperse, and were cooped up within the town by the “Earl
Marischal of Scotland,” who, hastily levying a few hundred men, came
upon them, when, according to Spalding, they “were looking for nothing
less;” and the “ young laird of Cromartie,” with a few others, were
compelled to take refuge “ aboard of Andrew Finlay’s ship, then lying in
the road,” and “ hastily hoisted sail for England.” Urquhart had
undertaken to be the bearer of despatches to Charles, containing the
signatures of his associates and neighbours the leading
anti-covenanters; and in the audience which he obtained of the monarch,
he was very graciously received, and favoured with an answer, “which
gave,” he says, “great contentment to all the gentlemen of the north
that stood for the king.” In the spring of 1641 he was knighted by
Charles at Whitehall, and his father dying soon after, he succeeded to
the lands of Cromarty.

Never was there a
proprietor less in danger of sinking into the easy apathetical indolence
of the mere country gentleman ; for, impressed with a belief that he was
born to enlarge the limits of all science, he applied himself to the
study of every branch of human learning, and, having mastered what was
already known, and finding the amount but little, he seriously set
himself to add to it. And first, as learning can be communicated only by
the aid of language, “ words being the signs of things,” he deemed it
evident that, if language be imperfect, learning must of necessity be so
likewise; quite on the principle that a defect in the carved figure of a
signet cannot fail of being transmitted to the image formed by it on the
wax. The result of his inquiries on this subject differed only a very
little from the conclusion which, when pursuing a similar course of
study, the celebrated Lord Monboddo arrived at more than a hundred years
after. His Lordship believed that all languages, except Greek, are a
sort of vulgar dialects which have grown up rather through accident than
design, and exhibit, in consequence, little else than a tissue of
defects both in sound and sense. Greek, however, he deemed a perfect
language; and he accounted for its superiority by supposing that, in
some early age of the world, it had been constructed on philosophical
principles, out of one of the old jargons, by a society of ingenious
grammarians, who afterwards taught it to the common people. Sir Thomas
went a little further; for, not excepting even the Greek, he condemned
every language, ancient and modem, and set himself to achieve what,
according to Monboddo, had been already achieved by the grammarians of
Greece. And hence his ingenious but unfortunate work, “The Universal
Language.”

“A tree,” he thus
reasoned, “is known by its leaves, a stone by its grit, a flower by the
smell, meats by the taste, music by the ear, colours by the eye,” and,
in short, all the several natures of things by the qualities or aspects
with which they address themselves to the senses or the intellect. And
it is from these obvious traits of similarity or difference that the
several classes are portioned by the associative faculty into the
corresponding cells of understanding and memory. But it is not thus with
words in any of the existing languages. Things the most opposite in
nature are often represented by signs so similar that they can hardly be
distinguished, and things of the same class by signs entirely different.
Language is thus formed so loosely and unskilfully, that the associative
faculty cannot be brought to bear on it;—one great cause why foreign
languages are so difficult to learn, and when once learned, so readily
forgotten. And there is a radical defect in the alphabets of all
languages; for in all, without exception, do the nominal number of
letters fall far short of the real, a single character being arbitrarily
made to represent a variety of sounds. Hence it happens that the people
of one country cannot acquaint themselves by books alone with the
pronunciation of another. The words, too, proper to express without
circumvolution all the midtiform ideas of the human mind, are not to be
found in any one tongue; and though the better languages have borrowed
largely from each other to supply their several deficiencies, even the
more perfect are still very incomplete. Hence the main difficulty of
translation. Some languages are fluent without exactness. Hence an
unprofitable wordiness, devoid of force and precision. Others,
comparatively concise, are harsh and inharmonious. Hence, perhaps, the
grand cause why some of the civilized nations (the Dutch for instance),
though otherwise ingenious, make but few advances compared with others,
in philology and the belles-lettres.

These, concluded Sir
Thomas, are the great defects of language. In a perfect language, then,
it is fundamentally necessary that there should be classes of resembling
words to represent the classes of resembling things—that every idea
should have its sign, and every simple sound its alphabetical character.
It is necessary, too, that there should be a complete union of
sweetness, energy, and precision. Setting himself down in the old castle
of Cromarty to labour on these principles for the benefit of all
mankind, and the glory of his country, he constructed his Universal
Tongue. There is little difficulty, when we remember where he wrote, in
tracing the origin of his metaphor, when he says of the existing
languages, that though they may be improved in structure “ by the
striking out of new light and doors, the outjetting of kernels, and the
erecting of prickets and barbicans,” they are yet restricted to a
certain base, beyond which they must not be enlarged. In his own
language the base was fitted to the superstructure. His alphabet
consisted of ten vowels, and twenty-five consonants. His radical classes
of words amounted to two hundred and fifty, and, to use his own
allegory, were the denizens of so many cities divided into streets,
which were again subdivided into lanes, the lanes into houses, the
houses into storeys, and the storeys into apartments. It was impossible
that the natives of one city should be confounded with those of another;
and by prying into their component letters and syllables, the street,
lane, house, storey, and apartment of every citizen, could be
ascertained without a possibility of mistake. Simple ideas were
expressed by monosyllables, and every added syllable expressed an added
idea. So musical was this language, that for poetical composition it
surpassed every other; so concise, that the weightiest thoughts could be
expressed in it by a few syllables, in some instances by a single word;
so precise, that even sounds and colours could be expressed by it in all
their varieties of tone and shade; and so comprehensive, that there was
no word in any language, either living or dead, that could not be
translated into it without suffering the slightest change of meaning.
And, with all its rich variety of phrase, so completely was it adapted
to the associative faculty, that it was possible for a boy of ten years
thoroughly to master it in the short space of three months! The entire
work, consisting of a preface, grammar, and lexicon, was comprised in a
manuscript of twelve hundred folio pages.

Laborious as this work
must have proved, it was only one of a hundred great works completed by
Sir Thomas before he had attained his thirty-eighth year, and all in a
style so exquisitely original, that neither in subject nor manner had he
been anticipated in so much as one of them. He had designed, and in part
digested, four hundred more. A complete list of these, with such a
description of each as I have here attempted of his Universal Language,
would be,’ perhaps, one of the greatest literary curiosities ever
exhibited to the world; but so unfortunate was he, as an author, that
the very names of the greater number of the works he finished have died
with himself, while the names of his projected ones were, probably,
never known to any one else. He prepared for the press a treatise on
Arithmetic, intended to remedy some defects in the existing system. The
invention of what he terms the “ Tris-sotetrail Trigonometry for the
facilitating of calculations by representations of letters and
syllables,” was the subject of a second treatise; and the proving of the
Equipollencie and Opposition both of Plain and Modal Enunciations by
rules of Geometry (I use his own language, for I am not scholar enough
to render it into common English), he achieved in a third. A fourth laid
open the profounder recesses of the Metaphysics by a continued
Geographical Allegory. He was the author also of ten books of Epigrams,
in all about eleven hundred in number, which he “contryved, blocked, and
digested,” he says, “in a thirteen weeks tyme;” and of this work the
manuscript still exists. It is said to contain much bad verse, and much
exceptionable morality; but at least one of its stanzas, quoted by Dr.
Irvine, in his elaborate and scholarlike Biographies of Scottish
writers, possesses its portion of epigrammatic point.

"A certain poetaster, not
long since,
Said I might follow him in verse and prose;
But, truly if I should, ’tis as a prince
Whose ushers walk before him as he goes.”

In Blackwood’s Magazine
for 1820, in a short critique on the Jewel, it is stated that the writer
had “good reasons to believe Sir Thomas to be the real author of that
singular production,

A Century of Names, and
Scantlings of Inventions, the credit or discredit of which was
dishonestly assumed by the Marquis of Worcester. The “good” reasons are
not given; nor am I at all sure that they would be found particularly
good; for the Marquis is a well-known man; and yet, were intrinsic
evidence to be alone consulted, it might be held that either this little
tract was written by Sir Thomas, or, what might be deemed less probable,
that the world, nay, the same age and island, had produced two Sir
Thomases.1 Some little weight, too, might be attached to the facts, that
many of his manuscripts were lost in the city of Worcester, with which
place, judging from his title, it is probable the Marquis may have had
some connexion, by residence or otherwise; and that the “Century of
Names” was not published until 1663, two years after death had disarmed
poor Sir Thomas of his sword and his pen, and rendered him insensible to
both his country’s honour

But the merit of the most
curious of all his treatises no one has ventured to dispute with him—a
work entitled “The True Pedigree and Lineal Descent of the Ancient and
Honourable Family of Urquhart.” It records the names of all the fathers
of the family, from the days of Adam to those of Sir Thomas; and may be
regarded as forming no bad specimen of the inverted climax—beginning
with God, the creator of all things, and ending with the genealogist
himself. One of his ancestors he has married (for he was a professed
lover of the useful) to a daughter of what the Abbe Pluche deemed an
Egyptian symbol of husbandry, and another to a descendant of what Bacon
regarded as a personification of human fortitude. In his notice of the
arms of the family he has surpassed all the heralds who have flourished
before or since. The first whose bearings he describes is Esormon,
sovereign prince of Achaia, the father of all such as bear the name of
Urquhart, and the fifth from Japhet by lineal descent. His arms were
three banners, three ships, and three ladies in a field; or, the crest,
a young lady holding in her right hand a brandished sword, and in her
left a branch of myrtle; the supporters, two Javanites attired after the
soldier habit of Achaia; and the motto, Tavra r, rg/a dg/o^e-ara—These
three are worthy to behold. Heraldry and Greek were alike anticipated by
the genius of this family. The device of Esormon was changed about six
hundred years after, under the following very remarkable circumstances.
Molin, a celebrated descendant of this prince, and a son-in-law of
Deucalion and Pyrrha, accompanied Galethus, the AEneas of Scotland, to
the scene of his first colony, a province of Africa, which in that age,
as in the present, was infested with wild beasts. He excelled in
hunting; and having in one morning killed three lions, he carried home
their heads in a large basket, and presented it to his wife Panthea,
then pregnant with her first child. Unconscious of what the basket
contained, she raised the lid, and, filled with horror and astonishment
by the apparition of the heads, she struck her hand against her left
side, exclaiming, in the suddenness of her surprise, “O Hercules! what
is this?” By a wonderful sympathy, the likeness of the three heads, grim
and horrible as they appeared in the basket, was impressed on the left
side of the infant, who afterwards became a famous warrior, and
transferred to his shield the badge which nature had thus bestowed upon
him. The external ornaments of the bearings remained unaltered until the
days of Astorimon, who, after his victory over Ethus, changed the myrtle
branch of the lady for one of palm, —Mean, speak, and do well. Both the
shield and the supporters underwent yet another change in the reign of
Solvatious of Scotland, who, in admiration of an exploit achieved by the
Urquhart and his two brothers in the great Caledonian forest, converted
the lions’ heads into the heads of bears, and the armed Javanites of
Esormon into a brace of greyhounds. And such were the arms of the family
in the days of Sir Thomas, as shown by the curious stone lintel now at
Kinbeakie.

This singular relic,
which has, perhaps, more of character impressed upon it than any other
piece of sandstone in the kingdom, is about five feet in length, by
three in breadth, and bears date a.m. 1612, a.g. 1651. On the lower and
upper edges it is bordered by a plain moulding, and at the ends by belts
of rich foliage, terminating in a chalice or vase. In the upper comer
two knights in complete armour on horseback, and with their lances
couched, front each other, as if in the tilt-yard. Two Sirens playing on
harps occupy the lower. In the centre are the arms—the charge on the
shield three bears’ heads, the supporters two greyhounds leashed and
collared, the crest a naked woman holding a dagger and* palm, the helmet
that of a knight, with tl^e beaver partially raised; and so profusely
mantled that the drapery occupies more space than the shield and
supporters, and the motto meane weil, speak weil, and do weil. Sir
Thomas’s initials, S. T. Y. C., are placed separately, one letter at the
outer side of each supporter, one in the centre of the crest, and one
beneath the label; while the names of the more celebrated heroes of his
genealogy, and the eras in which they flourished, occupy, in the
following inscription, the space between the figures:—Anno Astorimonis,
2226. Anno Vocompotis, 3892. Anno Molini, 3199. Anno Rodrici, 2958. Anno
Chari, 2219. Anno Lutorci, 2000. Anno Esormonis, 3804. It is melancholy
enough that this singular exhibition of family pride should have been
made in the same year in which the family received its deathblow—the
year of Worcester battle.

During the eventful
period which intervened between the death of Sir Thomas’s father and
this unfortunate year, he was too busily engaged with science and
composition to take an active part in the affairs of the kingdom. “In
the usual sports of country gentlemen, he does not seem,” says Dr.
Irvine, “to have taken any great share;” and a characteristic anecdote
which he relates in his “Logopandacteision,” shows that he rated these
simply by what they produced, estimated at their money value, and
accordingly beneath the care of a man born to extend the limits of all
human knowledge. “There happened,” he says, “a gentleman of very good
worth to stay awhile at my house, who one day, amongst many others, was
pleased in the deadest time of all the winter, with a gun upon his
shoulder, to search for a shot of some wild-fowl; and after he had waded
through many waters, taken excessive pains in quest of his game, and by
means thereof had killed some five or six moor-fowls and partridges,
which he brought along with him to my house, he was, by some other
gentlemen who chanced to alight at my gate as he entered in, very much
commended for his love of sport; and as the fashion of most of our
countrymen is not to praise one without dispraising another, I was
highly blamed for not giving myself in that kind to the same exercise,
having before my eyes so commendable a pattern to imitate. I answered,
though the gentleman deserved praise for the evident proof he had given
that day of his inclination to thrift and laboriousness, that
nevertheless I was not to blame, seeing, whilst he was busied about that
sport, I was employed in a diversion of another nature, such as optical
secrets, mysteries of natural philosophic, reasons for the variety of
colours, the finding out of the longitude, the squaring of a circle, and
wayes to accomplish all trigonometrical calculations by signes, without
tangents, with the same comprehensiveness of computation; which, in the
estimation of learned men, would be accounted worth six hundred thousand
partridges and as many moorfowls. That night past—the next morning I
gave sixpence to a footman of mine to try his fortune with the gun
during the time I should disport myself in the breaking of a young horse
; and it so fell out, that by I had given myself a good heat by riding,
the boy returned with a dozen of wildfowls, half moorfowl half
partridge; whereat, being exceedingly well pleased, I alighted, gave him
my horse to care for, and forthwith entered in to see my gentlemen, the
most especiall whereof was unable to rise out of his bed by reason of
the gout and siatick, wherewith he was seized through his former day’s
toil.”

Sir Thomas, though he had
taken part with the king, was by no means a cavalier of the extreme
class. His grandfather, with all his ancestors for centuries before, had
been Papists ; and he himself was certainly no Presbyterian, and indeed
not a man to contend earnestly about religion of any kind. He hints
somewhat broadly in one of his treatises, that Tamerlane might possibly
be in the right in supposing God to be best pleased with a diversity of
worship. But though lax in his religious opinions, he was a friend to
civil liberty; and loved his country too well to be in the least
desirous of seeing it sacrificed to the ambition of even a native
prince. And so we find him classing in one sentence, the doctrine “de
jure divino” with “picefraudes” and “political whimsies,” and expressing
as his earnest wish in another, that a free school and standing library
should be established in every parish of Scotland. But if he liked ill
the tyranny and intolerance of Kings and Episcopalians, he liked the
tyranny and intolerance of Presbyterian churchmen still worse. And there
was a circumstance which rendered the Consistorial government much less
tolerable to him than the Monarchical. The Monarchical recognised him as
a petty feudal prince, vested with a prerogative not a whit less kingly
in his own little sphere than that which it challenged for itself; while
the Consistorial pulled him down to nearly the level of his vassals, and
legislated after the same fashion for both.

He found, too, that
unfortunately for his peace, the churchmen were much nearer neighbours
than the King. He was patron, and almost sole heritor of the churches of
Cromarty, Kirkmichael, and Cullicuden, and in desperate warfare did he
involve himself with all the three ministers at once. Two of them were
born vassals of the house; an ancestor of one of these “ had shelter on
the land, by reason of slaughter committed by him, when there was no
refuge for him anywhere else in Scotland;” and the other owed his
admission to his charge solely to the zeal of Sir Thomas, by whom he was
inducted in opposition to the wishes of both the people and the clergy.
And both ministers, prior to their appointment, had faithfully promised,
as became good vassals, to remain satisfied with the salaries of their
immediate predecessors. Their party triumphed, however, and the promise
was forgotten. In virtue of a decree of Synod, they sued for an
augmentation of stipend; Sir Thomas resisted; and to such extremities
did they urge matters against him, as to “outlaw and declare him rebel,
by open proclamation, at the market-cross of the head town of his own
shire.” He joined issue with Mr. Gilbert Anderson, the minister of
Cromarty, on a different question. The church he regarded as exclusively
his own property; and the minister, who thought otherwise, having
sanctioned one of his friends to erect a desk in it, Sir Thomas, who
disliked the man, pulled it down. There was no attempt made at replacing
it; but for several Sabbaths together, all the worst parts of Mr.
Anderson’s sermons were devoted entirely to the benefit of the knight;
who was by much too fond of panegyric not to be affected by censure.
Even when a prisoner in the Tower, and virtually stripped of all his
possessions, he continued to speak of the “aconital bitterness” of the
preacher in a style that shows how keenly he must have felt it.

On the coronation of
Charles II. at Scone, he quitted the old castle, to which he was never
again to return, and joined the Scottish army: carrying with him, among
his other luggage, three huge trunks filled with his hundred
manuscripts. He states that on this occasion he “ was his own paymaster,
and took orders from himself.” The army was heterogeneously composed of
Presbyterians and Cavaliers; men who had nothing in common but the cause
which brought them together, and who, according to Sir Thomas, differed
even in that. He has produced no fewer than four comparisons, all good,
and all very original, to prove that the obnoxious Presbyterians were
rebels at heart. They make use of kings, says he, as we do of card kings
in playing at the hundred, discard them without ceremony, if there be
any chance of having a better game without them; —they deal by them as
the French do by their Roi de la feve, or king of the bean—first honour
them by drinking their health, and then make them pay the reckoning; or
as ‘players at nine-pins do by the king Kyle, set them up to have the
pleasure of knocking them down again; or, finally, as the wassailers at
Christmas serve their king of Misrule, invest him with the title for no
other end than that he may countenance all the riots and disorders of
the family. He accuses, too, some of the Presbyterian gentlemen, who had
been commissioned to levy troops for the army, of the practices resorted
to by the redoubtable Falstaff, when intrusted with a similar
commission; and of returning homewards when matters came to the push,
out of an unwillingness to “hazard their precious persons, lest they
should seem to trust to the arm of flesh.” Poor Sir Thomas himself was
not one of the people who, in such circumstances, are readiest at
returning home. At any rate he stayed long enough on the disastrous
field of Worcester to be taken prisoner. Indifferent, however, to
personal risk or suffering, he has detailed only the utter woe which
befell his hundred manuscripts.

He had lodged, prior to
the battle, in the house of a Mr. Spilsbury, “a very honest sort of man,
who had an exceeding good woman to his wife;” and his effects,
consisting of “scarlet cloaks, buff suits, arms of all sorts, and seven
large portmantles full of precious commodity,” were stored in an upper
chamber. Three of the “portmantles,” as has been said already, were
filled with manuscripts in folio, “to the quantity of six score and
eight quires and a half, divided into six hundred forty and two
quintemions, the quinternion consisting of five sheets, and the quire of
five-and-twenty.” There were, besides, law-papers and bonds to the value
of about three thousand pounds sterling. After the total rout of the
king’s forces, the soldiers of Cromwell went about ransacking the
houses; and two of them having broken into Mr. Spilsbury’s house, and
finding their way to the upper chamber, the scarlet cloaks, the buff
suits, the seven “portmantles,” and the hundred manuscripts fell a prey
to their rapacity. The latter had well-nigh escaped, for at first the
soldiers merely scattered them over the floor; but reflecting, after
they had left the chamber, on the many uses to which they might be
applied, they returned and bore them out to the street. Some they
carried away with them, some they distributed among their comrades, and
the people of the town gathered up the rest. One solitary quinternion,
containing part of the preface to the Universal Language, found its way
into the kennel, and was picked out two days after by a Mr. Broughton,
“a man of some learning,” who restored it to Sir Thomas. His Genealogy
was rescued from the tobacco-pipes of a file of musketeers, by an
officer of Colonel Pride’s regiment, and also restored. But the rest he
never saw. He was committed to the Tower, with some of the other
Scottish gentlemen taken at Worcester; and a body of English troops were
garrisoned in the old castle, “ upon no other pretence but that the
stance thereof was stately, and the house itself of a notable good
fabric and contrivance.” So oppressive were their exactions, that though
he had previously derived from his lands an income of nearly a thousand
pounds per annum (no inconsiderable sum in the days of the
Commonwealth), not a single shilling found its way to the Tower.

The ingenuity which had
hitherto been taxed for the good of mankind and the glory of his
country, had now to be exerted for himself. First he published his
Genealogy, to convince Cromwell and the Parliament that a family which
Saturn’s scythe had not been able to mow in the progress of all former
ages, ought not to be prematurely cut off; but neither Cromwell nor the
Parliament took any notice of his Genealogy. Next he published, in a
larger work entitled the Jewel, a prospectus of his Universal Language:
Cromwell thought there were languages enough already. He described his
own stupendous powers of mind; Cromwell was not in the least astonished
at their magnitude. He hinted at the vast discoveries with which he was
yet to enrich the country; Cromwell left him to employ them in enriching
himself. In short, notwithstanding the much he offered in exchange for
liberty and his forfeited possessions, Cromwell disliked the bargain;
and so he remained a close prisoner in the Tower. It must be confessed
that, with all his ingenuity he was little skilled to conciliate the
favour of the men in power. They had beheaded Charles I., and he yet
tells them how much he hated the Presbyterians for the manner in which
they had treated that unfortunate monarch; and though they would fain
have dealt with Charles II. after the same fashion, he assures them,
that in no virtue, moral or intellectual, was that prince inferior to
any of his hundred and ten predecessors. Besides the Genealogy and the
Jewel, he published, when in the Tower, a translation of the three first
books of Rabelais, which has been described by a periodical critic as
the “finest monument of his genius, and one of the most perfect
transfusions of an author, from one language into another, that ever man
accomplished.” And it is remarked, with reference to this work, by Mr.
Motteux, that Sir Thomas “possessed learning and fancy equal to the task
which he had undertaken, and that his version preserves the very style
and air of the original.” What is known of the rest of his history may
be summed up in a few words. Having found means to escape out of prison,
he fled to the Continent, and there died on the eve of the Restoration
(indeed, as is said, out of joy at the event), in his forty-eighth year.

“The character of Sir
Thomas Urquhart,” says a modern critic, “was singular in the extreme. To
all the braveiy of the soldier and learning of the scholar, he added
much of the knight-errant, and more of the 'visionnaire and projector.
Zealous for the honour of his country, and fully determined to wage war,
both with hi3 pen and his sword, against all the defaulters who
disgraced it—credulous yet sagacious—enterprising but rash, he appears
to have chosen the Admirable Crichton as his pattern and model for
imitation. For his learning he may be denominated the Sir Walter Raleigh
of Scotland, and his pedantry was the natural fruit of erudition deeply
engrained in his mind. To this I may add, he possessed a disposition
prone to strike out new paths in knowledge, and a confidence in himself
that nothing could weaken or disturb. In short, the characters of the
humorist, the braggadocio, the schemer, the wit, the pedant, the
patriot, the soldier, and the courtier, were all intermingled in his,
and, together, formed a character which can hardly ever be equalled for
excess of singularity, or excess of humour—for ingenious wisdom, or
entertaining folly.” He is described by another writer as “not only one
of the most curious and whimsical, but one of the most powerful also, of
all the geniuses our part of the island has produced.”

He was unquestionably an
extraordinary man. There occur in some characters anomalies so striking,
that, on their first appearance, they surprise even the most practised
in the study of human nature. By a careful process of analysis, however,
we may arrive, in most instances, at what may be regarded as the simple
elements which compose them, and see the mystery explained. But it is
not thus with the character of Sir Thomas. Anomaly seems to have formed
its very basis, and the more we analyse the more inexplicable it
appears. It exhibits traits so opposite, and apparently so discordant,
that the circumstance of their amazing contrariety renders him as
decidedly an original as the Caliban of Shakspere.

His inventive powers seem
to have been of a high order. The new chemical vocabulary, with all its
philosophical ingenuity, is constructed on principles exactly similar to
those which he divulged more than a hundred years prior to its
invention, in the preface to his Universal Language. By what process
could it be anticipated that the judgment which had enabled him to fix
upon these principles, should have suffered him to urge in favour of
that language the facility it afforded in the making of anagrams! As a
scholar, he is perhaps not much overrated by the critic whose character
of him I have just transcribed. It is remarked of the Greek language by
Monboddo, that, “ were there nothing else to convince him of its being a
work of philosophers and grammarians, its dual number would of itself be
sufficient; for, as certainly as the principles of body are the point,
the line, and the surface, the principles of number are the monad and
the duad, though philosophers only are aware of the fact.” His Lordship,
in even this—one of the most refined of his speculations—was anticipated
by Sir Thomas. He, too, regarded the duad, “not as number, but as a step
towards number—as a medium between multitude and unity;” and he has
therefore assigned the dual its proper place in his Universal Language.
And is it not strikingly anomalous, that, with all this learning, he
should not only have failed to detect the silly fictions of the old
chroniclers, but that he himself should have attempted to impose on the
world with fictions equally extravagant! We find him, at one time,
seriously pleading with the English Parliament that he had a claim, as
the undoubted head and representative of the family of Japhet, to be
released from the Tower. We see him at another producing solid and
powerful arguments to prove that a union of the two kingdoms would be
productive of beneficial effects to both. When we look at his literary
character in one of its phases, and see how unconsciously he lays
himself open to ridicule, we wonder how a writer of such general
ingenuity should be so totally devoid of that sense of the incongruous
which constitutes the perception of wit But, viewing him in another, we
find that he is a person of exquisite humour, and the most successful of
all the translators of Rabelais. We are struck in some of his narratives
(his narrative of the death of Crichton, for instance) by a style of
description so gorgeously imaginative, that it seems to partake in no
slight degree of the grandeur and elevation of epic poetry. We turn over
a few of the pages in which these occur, and find some of the meanest
things in the language. And his moral character seems to have been
equally anomalous. He would sooner have died in prison than have
concealed, by a single falsehood, the respect which he entertained for
the exiled Prince, at the very time when he was fabricating a thousand
for the honour of his family. Must we not regard him as a kind of
intellectual monster—a sort of moral centaur ! His character is
wonderful, not in any of its single parts, but in its incongruity as a
whole. The horse is formed like other animals of the same species, and
the man much like other men ; but it is truly marvellous to find them
united.

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